OOAK Table Tennis Forum

Ok I have extremely limited funds but I got given a pc with a AMD Athlon 2.2ghz processor. It uses ddr1 ram modules.

It currently has only 512mb of ram and a crappy 40gig IDE hard drive. Im using the built in sound card .

Iv used my TD-12 to trigger samples in Kontakt which was fine when using a 'lite' kit, except there was noticeable latency. Only a split second but it was annoying just for jamming.
When I tried to load up a bigger kit it just maxed out the ram!

So Im thinking to start off with another 512mb ddr1 module and see if this helps. This will double the ram and is cheap to try out. Only thing is though that it will be unmatched to the ram I currently have. Will this matter much?

Then maybe I'l try a faster modern SATA hard drive. Also not too expensive

After that I'l look at a better sound card.

I appreciate the computer I'm working with is old by modern standers but If necessary it can accomodate a 3.2ghz processor and up to 3gb or ram. best server motherboards

So I am going to give upgrading this on the cheap a go. I looking really for practical tips on how to proceed, what to try first, what to avoid and things to be aware of.

Thanks for reading my post .

For the latency, my primary suspect would be the onboard sound/MIDI module. If you have a sound card available, try it. Any old SoundBlaster should do nicely. Some of the no-name clones are OK, but most of what I tried were terrible (worse than your regular onboard stuff). If "jamming" is mainly playing along with your own loops/samples, that should do the trick.

If you jam with others over the internet, you may also want to check ping times. Any latency exceeding 25ms will be annoying, so do a large ping series (50 or so) and ensure that all round trips are within 20ms. If you get anything above that, you need to be closer to each other network-wise. Network connection should be wired end-to-end. Using the same ISP is an advantage.

Different RAM modules may be OK. If they are both faster than the max frequency supported by the motherboard, you should be OK. Otherwise, there may be issues. Some motherboards will autodetect speed using one of the RAM slots as a "master slot". (Typically labeled slot 0 or 1, or different color on the socket.) Others may test all slots and use slowest.

The amount of RAM should not have any bearing on latency (audio and other realtime data should not swap to disk), but of course if the RAM "clocks off" badly (because of wrong speed detection) there may be noticeable delays or noise.

The disk type and size also should make little difference. A 40GB IDE disk will be old, so it may fail at any time. If this is part of a setup you plan to use for performances, make sure that you have reliable equipment and/or a backup plan.

If you plan to do audio recordings, you will need something significantly larger anyway. Separate system and data disks may be a good idea, so perhaps you want to keep your old disk with the new one if you have space for both. I don't think there is any significant overhead when you use IDE alongside SATA, but this may also depend on the internal bus organizing. If you experience issues, this may be an area to check (just disconnect the IDE and install everyting on SATA disk(s).).

About three years ago I found some motherboard/CPU combos on Lazada, from China. In essence, they were using Xeon CPUs from retired servers (about 5-6 years old) and building new motherboards which had modern features like USB3 and M.2 slots for NVMe SSDs. And they were cheap - I managed to get a motherboard, a Xeon CPU (can't remember which one it was, there were a LOT of different ones), and 16 GBytes of 9 bit DDR3 RAM (also pulled off servers of the same vintage), all for about USD100. I got a cheap case, some fans and coolers, a keyboard and mouse and a really cheap graphics card (it wouldn't work without one, Xeons don't have built in graphics). Got a 240 MByte NVME SSD for the system drive. And I found refurbished (i.e. pulled) DVD-R and hard drives, also very cheap. I hadn't put together a computer in years, and I discovered there was a craze going on at the time for building "gaming PCs". All the local PC parts shops had PCs being built on the counter tops, and there were customers being helped putting PCs together. Some parts were hard to get. Good thermal paste was REALLY hard to find. Lots and lots and lots of PC building videos on YouTube.

I ended up with a really nice, fast PC that does everything I want (I have no interest in video games) for very little money (about USD250-300 more or less). I haven't looked at the current situation - there's supposedly a chips shortage so maybe this thing about building PCs from recycled server CPUs is still going on.

Hmm yes indeed - still available.

https://shopee.com.my/OUBASIKII-X79-Mot ... 1a6d04c4e7

You can probably find these on Amazon - search for "X79".

Iskandar